In the wake of the Cerro Grande fire,
everyone ponders prescribed burning

POJOAQUE, N.M. - As he stood outside a high school gym-turned
refugee shelter, Pete Olivas was feeling numb. In 1945, his father,
a Manhattan Project machinist, watched the first atomic bomb
explode over the New Mexico desert near Alamogordo. This May 10,
the younger Olivas and his wife, Loretta, watched a different kind
of explosion, as 50 mile-per-hour winds whipped a wildfire toward
their home in Los Alamos.

With policemen and
firemen yelling at them through loudspeakers to get out, with ashes
raining onto their faces, the couple loaded up everything they
could, stuffing two Harley Davidson motorcycles into a travel
trailer.

Now, Olivas was pulling a wagon filled
with bottles of soda pop and drinking water. A few feet away,
evacuees waited in line to pick up their mail from postal crews
standing behind long metal tables. Inside the gym, others munched
on cookies, sipped tea and stared at huge TV screens showing
burning houses lit up like jack-o-lanterns.

One
of those houses was the one the Olivases bought in 1967. They later
added a large bathroom, a big walk-in closet and a two-car
garage.

"I did it all myself," Olivas said of the
renovation work. "I did all the plumbing and I did all of the
electrical work. I don't anticipate doing that any more. They
burned it. They can build it."

Fingerpointing
was the prevailing mode in New Mexico as the Cerro Grande fire
raged through 47,000 acres of forest surrounding the Atomic City.
The fire torched more than 230 houses and apartments, forcing the
evacuation of 25,000 residents of Los Alamos and surrounding
communities. Total costs for firefighting and cleanup are expected
to run over $1 billion.

Most people blamed the
National Park Service, which began this blaze as a controlled burn
in Bandelier National Monument, May 4. The fire escaped into the
Santa Fe National Forest, where it swept into Los
Alamos.

The Park Service accused the U.S. Forest
Service of delaying several hours before sending back-up crews
after park officials first called for help.

The
Santa Clara Indian Pueblo accused the Forest Service of not moving
soon enough to corral the fire as it burned five miles of Santa
Clara Canyon on the reservation.

Critics also
accused the Department of Energy of failing to clear enough trees
around the Los Alamos National Laboratory; the fire charred 12 of
the laboratory's 43 square miles and approached several facilities
where nuclear wastes are stored.

But across the
Southwest, many fire scientists were pointing at a different
culprit: a century of fire suppression and overgrazing that has
turned national forests around the West into fire traps (HCN,
3/6/95: How the West's asbestos fires were turned into
tinderboxes). These experts say the lesson learned at Cerro Grande
is about more than the federal government's policy of lighting
prescribed fires.

This fire is also a warning
about the dangers of unhealthy forests, and the risks they pose to
growing towns in the West.

An altered
ecosystem

On May 18, Los Alamos residents got the
admission of guilt that most had wanted. Interior Secretary Bruce
Babbitt released a report outlining what he called a systematic
failure of the federal government's handling of the fire. He
described a series of mistakes that he likened to pebbles kicked
loose from a mountainside - first one, then another, until it
became a landslide. Babbitt promised that the federal government
would accept liability for the burned
homes.

Among the errors: monument superintendent
Roy Weaver had failed to thoroughly review the burn plan before
approving it; the Cerro Grande burn boss lacked the proper
training; the Park Service lacked adequate staff and resources at
the fire scene and didn't follow its usual procedures for
controlled burns.

Babbitt's judgment came as a
second escaped prescribed fire on the North Rim of Grand Canyon
National Park was burning more than 13,000
acres.

While scientists did not defend the Park
Service, many echoed the words of Rob Mitchell, director of Texas
Tech University's Fire Ecology Center: "A fire like this was
inevitable. Los Alamos was living on the
edge."

Literally. Los Alamos is bounded on three
sides by thick ponderosa pine forests. Many residents moved to
neighborhoods along the forest boundary because they liked living
in the midst of the trees. But the public had received several
warnings about the fire risk.

Two recent studies
had predicted a fire exactly like the one that occurred - a blast
that blew into the town and lab from the forests lining Pajarito
Mountain.

"Everyone is looking at the fact that
the Park Service set this fire, and that cannot be ignored," said
Tom Swetnam, director of the University of Arizona tree ring
laboratory. "But there is plenty of evidence that these forests
were going to burn like this sooner or later, whether it was
started by lightning, careless smokers or unattended
campfires.

"There's no excuse for these kinds of
mistakes being made," he adds. "But the great irony is that the
Park Service and the Forest Service were trying to avoid these
kinds of fires."

Swetnam's studies have
reconstructed the changing conditions in the Santa Fe National
Forest that gave the Cerro Grande fire plenty to burn. The
tree-ring scars chart the history of fires in the Jemez Mountains,
including Cerro Grande, Spanish for "Big Mountain," Bandelier
National Monument's tallest point.

Swetnam and
United States Geological Survey scientist Craig Allen determined
that a century ago, Cerro Grande was capped by an open, grassy
meadow and relatively few trees. Once or twice a decade, fires
would race 1 to 3 feet high through the grasslands, but generally
didn't burn hot enough to reach the treetops.

The
fires largely stopped in the late 1800s, after settlers introduced
large numbers of sheep. The sheep ate the grass that allowed fires
to spread. A decade or so later, authorities started putting out
what fires did occur. Aerial photos from the 1930s and 1970s showed
that thick stands of trees invaded, and eventually obliterated,
most of the ancient mountain meadow, reducing grasslands by 55
percent from 1935 to 1981.

Now, rather than
regular low-intensity grass fires, these thick, dog-hair forests
are susceptible to hotter, more destructive crown fires. The Cerro
Grande fire is the fourth to hit the Santa Fe National Forest since
1977.

"Once heated, the volatile gases and other
materials come out of the leaves," says Swetnam. "They literally
explode. It creates its own wind, and becomes a firestorm."

Cutting trees to save the
forest

Bill Armstrong of the Forest Service's Espanola
Ranger District says he saw the firestorm coming. After the 1996
Dome fire briefly crept onto lab property, he helped organize an
interagency team to try to prevent future disasters. His 1998 study
predicted a 30 percent chance of a fire entering the lab over the
next five years. A year later, a U.S Department of Energy study
said that "a major fire moving up to the edge of Los Alamos
National Laboratory is not only credible, but likely."

In 1998 and 1999, congressional General
Accounting Office reports warned that catastrophic fires would
bombard the West. The only remedy, according to the reports, would
be a dramatic federal effort costing $12 billion over the next 15
to 20 years to burn and thin the forests.

Around
Los Alamos, the Forest Service started work in 1998 on a proposal
to thin the trees on the lab perimeter from 900 to 2,000 per acre
to about 60 to 80 per acre, and to burn several thousand other
acres. As the Cerro Grande fire began, the agency had just finished
an environmental assessment of the $1 million to $1.5 million
project and was preparing to send it out for public
comment.

"Our top priority was (an area) directly
adjacent to the laboratory," Armstrong says. "If we could have
thinned and burned, the fire would never have gotten to the homes.
We did not do it fast enough. We didn't have the ability and
resources to do it fast enough."

Another reason
the project was delayed, Armstrong said, was that he took extra
time to make the environmental document "ironclad," to counteract
anticipated opposition from Forest Guardians and other
environmental groups that have challenged other thinning
projects.

But according to Forest
Magazine, the Los Alamos area wasn't even the Santa Fe
forest's top priority for fire-risk reduction. Rich Wands, then a
Santa Fe forest fire management officer, was quoted as saying that
the Jemez Ranger District, well southwest of the lab, was a higher
priority because it is drier and because Albuquerqueans use it
heavily for recreation. Wands now works for a Forest Service
training center in Marana, Ariz., and was unavailable for comment
at press time.

Sam Hitt, founder of Forest
Guardians, took issue with Armstrong, saying, "The fact that it
takes Bill Armstrong two years to prepare an EA is his problem. The
law is the law, and he has to comply with the law." Hitt contended
that logging could aggravate the forests' fire risk, by opening up
tree stands to drying winds and solar
radiation.

"There's a tremendous amount of
evidence that it is not fuel densities but climate conditions that
make the difference with fire," Hitt said. "No matter whether there
are 60 or 7,000 trees per acre, the fires will cook" if it's hot
and dry enough.

That thinning project is now as
dead as the blackened ponderosas. But a nationwide thinning debate
is about to be rekindled. Babbitt says he will propose a program to
thin trees in forests surrounding urban areas of the West. His
model: a program that has operated several years under Wallace
Covington, director of Northern Arizona University's Ecological
Restoration Institute (HCN, 3/1/99: Flagstaff searches for its
forests' future).

"I hope we will really get
serious about doing restoration-based fuel treatments," says
Covington. "One of my nightmares is when we have a catastrophe like
this, we find the public supporting draconian fuel treatments (such
as) just clear-cut(ting) circles around mountain communities. But
we don't have to log off all the trees so we can stop all crown
fires. What we argue for is restoring
forests."

Covington uses tree rings, photos and
other evidence to plan a thinning program to recreate a forest's
appearance of a century ago. In the Mount Trumbull area on the
Arizona Strip north of the Grand Canyon, his program has cut 80
percent of all trees on 1,200 to 1,500 acres. He targets trees over
16-inch diameter only if they grow where prairie vegetation existed
in 1870.

Still, Forest Service officials estimate
that only 3 percent of northern Arizona's forests are
fire-protected. In May, an interagency report found that 40,000
acres of forest around Flagstaff are at high risk of catastrophic
wildfire. On May 17, Gov. Jane Hull declared a "wildfire emergency"
in Arizona.

In New Mexico, extreme fire danger
has prompted the Forest Service to close much of the 1.1
million-acre Lincoln National Forest. Two wildfires in May burned
more than 24,000 acres of the Lincoln.

"We're
stuck in this period of saying, 'Let's study it a little bit
longer,' "says Covington, "instead of saying, 'We have a problem,
we need to create some fuel breaks, but let's do it with the best
knowledge.' "

In the wake of the Cerro Grande
fire, New Mexico's senators, Democrat Jeff Bingaman and Republican
Pete Domenici, announced that they will introduce a bill aimed at
protecting Western communities from wildfire. The pair is touting
the bill as a rural jobs program, not a justification for
logging.

But the General Accounting Office's 1999
report warned that thinning's potential was limited by widespread
public concern about water, erosion, endangered species and other
environmental issues. In addition, the places where thinning is
most needed have a lot of commercial potential for selling the
timber to logging companies, the report said.

And
the plan is sure to hit resistance from conservationists such as
Forest Guardians' Hitt, who opposes all commercial logging,
including thinning. He says cutting trees can never match burning
in promoting biological diversity and can hurt the soil with roads,
compaction and loss of long-term
productivity.

"Logging and thinning doesn't
recycle nutrients. It removes nutrients from the system," he
says.

The future of
fire

Covington and other fire ecologists also worry that
the mistakes of Cerro Grande could seriously damage the federal
prescribed-burn program. On May 12, as helicopters dropped buckets
of water onto the Cerro Grande blaze, Babbitt announced a 30-day
suspension of the program across the West while federal fire
experts reviewed the policy. Later, he promised to revamp the
program "from A to Z."

Babbitt's timetable
troubles Mitchell of the fire ecology center, which conducts 20 to
30 burns a year in four states, mostly on private land. Mitchell
worries that the moratorium could last months because Babbitt's
questions about the program aren't easily
answered.

"Every year that we are unable to burn
acres in desperate need of burning, we get farther and farther
behind," Mitchell says. "Prescribed burns are something we will
need to continue from now to eternity."

Stephen
Pyne, a fire ecologist with Arizona State University and a big
proponent of prescribed fire, says "we need to rethink how we do
it," and suggested the time may be right for a general review. The
simultaneous escape of two burns means something systematic must be
wrong with the Park Service program, he says. "It's not just
someone misplacing a fax with the weather forecast."

After Cerro Grande, Pyne says, the first thing
many TV reporters would say to him is "we need to protect
prescribed burning because it is inherently good." The same
attitude prevailed a century ago when firefighters were first
promoting suppression, he says, but it's not that
simple.

"Today, the analogy is that we can't
criticize prescribed burning because it will send a confusing
message. I think it may be mandatory in every place in the West,
but that doesn't mean we have to defend the way it is being done
now." "